Time #1

I've been telling my readers that my delay in posting is the need to let my shoulder heal and all the anxiety around getting my younger one into school. I haven't lied to anyone either. My shoulder did go through a rough two weeks, and my daughter has been -- until the last three months -- frantically resistant to going to school. Working with her on this point has been a mind-numbing exercise in guesswork, until she finally decided that being a big girl with her friends was more exciting that being stuck home with Mom. But these two reasons are the surface reasons.

The deeper reason is: I'm scared.

I posted the last couple of chapters before I felt mentally ready to do so. At the exact moment of posting, they felt very ready. I felt very ready. And then in the morning I woke up with regrets, with "Aw, crap -- I forgot"'s, with a vague, relentless sense that I had let myself, my readers and the story down because the chapters hadn't been honed enough. Within this story, I have a lot of plates in the air now, many of them emotional. It's impossible for me to keep track of them all within the first couple of drafts. There's so much to consider now as we reach not only the end of the physical journey, but of the emotional one -- or really, at least a plateau the characters can work from.

I'm scared I will miss something important. I'm scared I will drop a major ball. I don't know how else to manage this but to write it slowly and carefully, so I don't. And that requires concentration and quiet and time -- something I'm kinda short on when my shoulder aches and I'm getting two kids into the new school year, and the spouse is convinced that once the kids are in school, I'll gladly keep the house spotlessly clean (there's a lot more to this issue, but for now I'm not going into it here). And so I can only do what I can do, which is how I've written this thing so far, and I'm afraid at this stage of the story it's just not enough.

I had performance anxiety before, but not anything like this. This is making not want to write it at all, until I have a sense that no one is actually looking and I can do this in peace. Frankly, I'm embarrassed and ashamed of the last couple of chapters. Action-wise, they are correct. What happens in them is what happens. But in terms of craft, I feel like they're crap. I feel like I'm going to drown in dropped balls and missteps and lost details. Things reviewing the story as a whole could catch, if only I'd done that. But it would have taken a year, and then who would have lost interest first: the readers, or me? I don't know. And I've learned more than I could ever detail by doing this. I can't regret learning what I have, or gaining the understanding and skill I have, that I didn't have at the beginning of this story.

I just feel, suddenly, like I'm screwing up. As I said yesterday, I'm not where I though I would be in the story. And now I feel out of sync with my own vision and I know it shows. I feel like I'm putting incomplete (read: imperfect) work out there because of my deadlines. I have that hamstringing feeling that If I Just Had Enough Time...Because in the end, this really is about the work not being perfect. Is anyone's work ever perfect? Do you suppose authors at the top of the NYT Bestseller list struggle with this sense too? I'm wondering if this what they mean when they say the work is never finished, it's just done.